California Part 1

Getting the timing right for a kayaking trip to California is never easy. It's even harder or close to impossible if you have only 17days off work to go. When we booked the flights for our trip to California it actually seemed to be the wrong year to go. The snow-pack was minimal and many drainages had already been dry by April or, like the Royal gorge, never had come in. Of all the high sierra classics only two still had the chance to come in: Upper Cherry Creek and the Middle Kings (and Devil`s Pospile on the San Joaquin, which wasn`t on our list though). Flow windows for those creeks are usually quite short (especially at UCC) so at the time we booked our flights we didn't know if we would paddle any of those runs. We knew we would head north to Oregon/Washington if none of the Californian creeks would be in. Our group consisted of Daniel Egger, Matthias Zeiner, Robert Machacek and the Glanz Brothers.

A month before our departure the situation looked very bad. The snow was almost gone. But all of a sudden the weather turned in our favor, it got cooler, which preserved the remaining snow much longer. A couple days before we left, we eventually got a really good message from Darin McQuoid. Upper Cherry and Middle Kings might fall right in our time window!

We arrived at San Francisco airport, got our rental car and burned our first fuel tank on the way to Sacramento to get our boats the next day. The guys picked up their boats at CCK with no problems while I tried to get a hold of Darin, since he would lend me one of his boats for the trip. Here's a shout-out to Darin McQuoid - one of the nicest paddlers I've ever met! Thank you again for being so kind and lending me a boat for free and for all the beta!

After getting our custom rig at Lowe's for our boats, we met up with Darin, Tomass Marnics and Diane Gaydos at CCK and drove up to South Silver. Right there we met up with Rok Sribar and Yoshihiro Takahashi. This creek had been dry for some time it was running because of a storm a couple days before. We hit it with low water but this creek was still awesome and a highlight of the trip. Steep bedrock but somehow still low stress. Very nice.

Matthias Zeiner firing up the first rapid of the trip - Autobahn, South Silver - Photo: Daniel Egger

Teacups

Skyscraper - Photo: Daniel Egger

Diane Gaydos running Skyscraper

Same girl, same rapid, another lap

Offramp!

Daniel Egger finishing up Skyscraper

Skyscraper again - Matthias - Photo: Reiner Glanz

After South Silver we were invited to a
BBQ at Daniel Brasuell's house. (Which turned out to be our base-camp for a
couple days.) Big thanks to Diane and Daniel for letting us crash at your
place all those nights!

During
the BBQ we figured out a plan for the next day: Cherry Proper.
Rok described it as a Soca-Cateract-but-longer-steeper-and-way-cleaner like
section running at higher than normal water (2000cfs,60m³).

No pictures of the run
since we ran most rapids blind behind Rok and Daniel. I portaged some of
the bigger ones. This section is intense if you don't know the river
and run it blind. Intense in a good way though. After Cherry
Proper we decided to go back to Sacramento to do a play-boat run the
next day on Chili Bar run on the south fork of American river. We were
invited to another BBQ after the run right at the river. Very friendly
people everywhere.

We tried to figure out a plan for the next couple days. The options were the upper North Fork San Joaquin, Mid Cherry, or the South Fork of the Kings river. On the way to the North Fork San Joaquin we realized that we had almost no beta other than there was a 8 mile hike-in, a 3 mile hike-out, a big waterfall.... We didn't know where to hike-in, where to hike out? Hmmmm.

We had hoped that Rok and Darin might also want to go, but they didn't, so we were on our own. We decided to drive to Yosemite to get some Wifi and find out more about the run. It turned out that we weren't able to get enough information to feel comfortable to start a 2 day mission. Instead we heard that West Cherry was in and this run seemed to be more straight forward.

Going back to Coulterville, we found a raft guide who would drive the long shuttle for some cash and started the hike-in to West Cherry the next day in the afternoon. The plan was to sleep at the put-in and finish the river to Cherry Lake the next day.

We knew that there would be a lot of portages on this creek, but it turned out to be a little worse than we all had thought. This creek does offer some nice bedrock rapids, but inbetween there are many massive drop-offs. Some are runnable, some are not. None of our group had the desire to hurt himself, so we portaged a lot. The scenery was extremely cool though. It might be a better idea to do this run in a day without sleeping at the put-in, because having a light boat would make a difference. We arrived at the confluence with Upper Cherry and found a raging river. West Cherry had about 250cms/7mm³, Upper Cherry brought at least 700cms/20m³. This turned into a portage-fest to the lake, since after a short discussion the group decided that we didn't want to enter Redrock gorge at this level.

We paddled over the lake after a long day and got to our car with the sunlight fading. West Cherry might be a great thing to do if you want to go huge. For us it was a good experience but I wouldn't do this one again.

With Upper Cherry running at over 1000cfs/30m³ at the run out into the lake we realized that it would take at least another 4-5days to take this run into serious consideration. Tuesday would be the last day for me to hike in, because I would leave on Saturday.

The group enjoys sitting down after mosquito infested hike-in to West Chery

West Cherry Camp - Damn you, mosquitos

West Cherry - Photo: Reiner Glanz

Robert Machacek running one of the few good rapids inbetween portages

Portage! (At least for us) - Photo: Reiner Glanz

Photo: Reiner Glanz

A Chevy Tahoe needs a lot of gas. 5 kayaks on the rooftop makes it even worse.

Big trees

We decided to head south to take a look at a section called Fear and Loathing on the South Kings river. This section had not been run a lot during the last couple years, because of two mandatory class 5+ rapids described in a guidebook called Fear and Loathing. A group had done the run in 2012 and found out that the two rapids had cleaned up during a flood and turned into good-to-go class 5 rapids.

After a drive through Sequoia National Park we got to the canyon of the South Kings and took out first scout of the rapids from street level. The first drop looked good to go, but the second one didn't look nice at all. It was late already, so we decided to drive up the valley and look for a place to camp. On the way up we took a look at the roadside section above Fear and Loathing that looked nice.

The next day we decided to run the upper section and that we'll take onto the canyon on the day after.

The section turned out a little pushier than thought. There were a couple of really nice drops, but also a couple of very nasty ones. After a couple hours the river turned into manky shit. We called it a day and got our car and went back to camp.

Well, the Loathing rapid didn't look any better in the morning light and we decided against entering the gorge without a local. Instead Reiner, Daniel and I put on the Garlic Falls section on the Kings River. We didn't know much about the section other than people continue running this section when they do Middle Kings. This was the hottest day during the trip and carrying down the boats at Yucca Point midday out to be a nightmare. We got to the river after a hard fight with the heat and poison oak. We quickly jumped into the goods to cool down and wash our gear. After a little break we started our decent.

The section was a really impressive, pushy run. We guessed the flow to be somewhere near 1500-2000 cfs / 40-60m³ which was a good flow. We ran into the first big drop blind and I quickly got caught in an creek-boat-freestyle session. I wasn't able to regain any control and had to exit my boat just in the moment Daniel ran into me and actually pushed me out of the hole. Anyways, I had already pulled my spraydeck and was on my way swimming down the remaining part of the rapid. I dived through 2 or 3 holes before the rapid mellowed out and Reiner pulled me to shore. Daniel got my boat, Reiner found the paddle 200 meters downstream. After 20 minutes I had collected myself and my gear. We continued the run in a little more defensive mode. The remaining section was awesome. A lot of boat scouting, eddy hopping, some lines through big rapids, some chicken lines and some quick portages. 4 hours later we arrived at the takeout, with Matthias and Robert waiting in the shadow with some cool beer. Nice!

Confluence of Middle and South Kings

This mandatory rapid can only be scouted from high above. It doesn't look nice. I'm quite sure it goes, but we decided not to enter the gorge without better beta or a local.

Nice drop on the upper South Kings - This section doesn't get run very often -it does have some nice drops but also some ugly ones...

Matthi styles the same drop - Photo: Reiner Glanz

Robert - Photo: Reiner Glanz

Yosemite again during our wait for Upper Cherry to drop in - Photo: Reiner Glanz

Photo: Reiner Glanz

Photo: Daniel Egger

We called up Daniel Brasuell and checked the situation on Upper Cherry. Looking at the gage of the Tuolumne above Hetchy Hetchy and the weather forecast witch told us that there would be a drop in temperatures we decided we would hike into Upper Cherry on Tuesday and hope that the level would have dropped enough by then. We drove up to Coulterville and a part of the group ran Cherry Proper again with Daniel and Diane.

Afterwards we had some tasty burgers, watched the NBA finals game and Diane decided that she would come along to Upper Cherry with us. We did our best to convince Daniel too, he really wanted to go I guess, but he was afraid that his bad ankle wouldn't hold up. On the last day before we started the hike in for Upper Cherry we visited Yosemite another time and drove up to Cherry Lake in the evening to start our hike early the next day.